close up views of work in the LINE exhibition
salon, doubtfire gallery, edinburgh
installation view
Monday 28 February 2011
self confidence, part 1
self-confidence, part 1, 2011
pencil on vellum
[detail 1]
[detail 2]
[detail 3]
installation view in studio
fox sister
fox sister 1, 2010
pencil on vellum
[detail]
fox sister 2, 2010
pencil and beeswax on vellum
[detail]
Sunday 27 February 2011
Saturday 26 February 2011
Friday 25 February 2011
the skinny preview for LINE exhibition
Salon @ Doubtfire Gallery, Frame Creative
Posted by Joseph Constable, Fri 25 Feb 2011
To add a further dimension to its already multifaceted approach, visual arts publication, LINE magazine, is launching its accompanying exhibition programme this month with a large and diverse group show. Running from 25 February to 11 March and housed in the rooms of Edinburgh’s Doubtfire Gallery, Salon looks to be a wide-ranging showcase of works from near twenty emerging and established artists.
To realise this new programme, LINE has teamed up with the curators of Candid, whose exhibition of May last year was also driven by a motive to promote and support emerging artists from around Scotland. Salon takes this idea one step further by inverting the seemingly unshakeable hierarchy of the art world; undergraduate artists from the ECA and GSA are shown next to those recognised both nationally and internationally.
Significant works include a drawing from music video director, Chris Cunningham, and prints from Scottish illustrator Vangeli Moschopoulos, whose work will be remembered from the show Midnight Clear, which was held at Doubtfire Gallery last December. There are more familiar faces from Scotland, with works from Rachel Maclean, Shaun O’Donnell, and Sophie Milner, the latter of which will be showing prints made for the musician Laura Marling. These works are nicely balanced by new work from the art schools, notably a series of sketch works from Kathryn Lloyd, a sculptural piece by Elliot Burns, and a large compilation work from Ian Rothwell and Hugo de Verteuil.
In what will likely be the first of many, Salon seeks to mirror the goals of its creators by championing fresh talent and giving it a professional platform, which can only be a good thing.
published for the skinny
www.theskinny.co.uk
review: craig murray-orr
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Landscape 13
Before viewing Craig Murray-Orr’s solo show at the Ingleby gallery, there is a fact everyone must know: Murray-Orr was born in New Zeland, but has spent two thirds of his life living in Hampstead, London. Although ostensibly pointless, this fact is necessary in understanding its impact on the artist’s practice. Despite his time in London, it is the artist’s memories of the terrain of his home-country which have influenced his forty-year career.
The exhibition is comprised of twenty small landscape paintings and four sculptures, three of which are varyingly sized mahogany guns. It is undeniable that these guns steal the show; each one elegantly carved from a single piece of wood. Upstairs, the largest of the three, Tribute to Florence Baker, looks as though it has been made for the space, despite it being completed over ten years ago. Celebrating the wife of explorer Samuel Baker, the sculpture is a testament to Murray-Orr’s mastery of simplicity, merging the horizontal form of a woman with the refined barrel of a gun.
Whilst the stature of Murray-Orr’s sculptural pieces dominate the galleries, twenty watercolour paintings hang from the walls. Nearly entirely monochrome, with hints of deep purple and dirty grey, these pieces are a jumble of childhood recollections. With a restrictive colour palette, the landscapes are barely distinguishable from one another; Landscape 9 becomes the ‘stormier’ one, Landscape 10 is the one with three colours, and Landscape 13 resembles the surface of the moon.
Ultimately, while the simplicity of Murray-Orr’s sculptures is their redeeming feature, it is the downfall of his paintings. Their subtlety, and the inaccessibility of his childhood memories creates a series of works that are emotively unreachable, leaving us with bland, monotonous abstracted forms of someone else’s reminiscence.
first published for the skinny
www.theskinny.co.uk
Thursday 24 February 2011
sleeping father
displayed next to dead grandfather
displayed at rsa open 2010
rubbish photograph, reflection off glass in frame
Wednesday 23 February 2011
i woke up and you were saying...
stand still and try to feel every part of yourself
well i suppose it takes all kinds of honour to make a world
try to detach yourself from your own energy
well i suppose it takes all kinds of honour to make a world
try to detach yourself from your own energy
review: jean-marc bustamante
The Fruitmarket’s solo show of old-timer Jean-Marc Bustamante is comprised of two groups of work: early photographs and sculptures produced between 1978 and 1997, and a selection of recent pieces made in the last three years. The difference between these two groupings is perhaps the most striking thing about the show; the vividness and plasticity of Bustamante’s contemporary practice eclipses the work from the beginning of his career.
Downstairs, the exhibition opens with the former group: large scale c-prints of mundane, peripheral places which are universally still and unoccupied. Serially entitled the ‘Tableaux’ (‘pictures’), Bustamante sought to raise the status of photography in a society blindly devoted to the medium of painting. Alongside his images of earth, trees and anonymous ruins, Bustamante presents sculptures that mimic, but are not reduced to, minimalist aesthetics. ‘Bac à sable II’ is a constructed sand pit, sleek and contemporary, incongruously resting on the floor, like a cavity in the earth.
Upstairs, the recent work demonstrates Bustamante’s increasing interest in painting, although his employment of ink on plexiglass retains something of the transparency inherent to photography. The process appears simultaneously creative and restrictive, with the bright colour palette, and clumsy shapes reminiscent of computerised scribbles. The sculptures have become a simplistic variation of their predecessors; employing stencil-like ‘landscape’ shapes, crude steel, and ink with the appearance of a muddy lake.
A preoccupation with natural phenomena is consistent throughout Bustamante’s oeuvre, but his work has changed from rusticity to plasticity. To view the artist’s creative progression is a luxury. However, it is a disjointed presentation; we see the beginning and end of a thirty year artistic career, but nothing in between.
first published in the journal, 23rd february
www.journal-online.co.uk
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Sunday 20 February 2011
collecting
hans bellmer, la poupee
'i collect everything that seems of value or might eventually be needed- doesn't everybody?' Hannah Hoch
'every library reflects a twofold need that is frequently also a twofold mania: the mania to keep certain things, and the mania to order them in a certain way.' Georges Perec
'i need to sleep back to front with someone who adores me. I will think more before I cannot. I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.' Jenny Holzer, Selection from Laments
'the anagram is the key to all my work. the body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it.' Hans Bellmer
'my speech is a warning that at this very moment death is at loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as i speak, and the begin i address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. death alone allows me to grasp what i want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.' maurice blanchot
'life is organised around that which is hollow' louise bourgeois
'the obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which 'gapes open.' it is an appeal to being as all holes are.' jean-paul sartre
'And God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man'
SO IDA, ADIOS
'Why do I turn once again to writing?
Beloved, you must not ask such a question,
For the truth is, I have nothing to tell you,
All the same, your dear hands will hold this note.’ Roland Barthes
'I knew a certain Benedicta who filled earth and air with ideals; and from whose eyes men learnt the desire for greatness, beauty, glory, and for everything that strengthened their belief in immortality.
But this miraculous child was too beautiful to live long. She died only a few days after I had come to know her, and I buried her with my own hands, one day when Spring wafted the contents of its censer even as far as the graveyard. I buried her with my own hand, well sealed in a coffin of wood, perfumed and incorruptible as an Indian casket.
And as I stood gazing at the place where I had hidden my treasure, all at once I saw a little person singularly like the deceased. She was trampling on the fresh soil with strange hysterical violence, and was laughing and shouting: ‘I am the real Benedicta! and a vile slut I am, too! And to punish you for your blindness and folly, you shall love me as I really am!’
But I was furious, and I answered: ‘No! no! no!’ And to add emphasis to my refusal, I stamped my foot so violently that my leg sank up to the knee in the earth over the new grave, and like a wolf caught in a trap, I remained fastened, perhaps forever, to the grave of the ideal.' Charles Baudelaire, ‘Which is the True One?’ from Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), 1869
rachel goodyear
beak stab, 2010
wriggler, 2010
restless sleeper, 2010
'Rachel Goodyear's drawings present captured moments where characters reside within an existence where social etiquette no longer, or maybe never applied.
She looks for unlikely relationships in everything she encounters. From this constant everyday cross-referencing she creates carefully constructed coincidences that are delicate in their nature and unsettling in their content.'
'Advice to new graduates? Don't stop. Form a collective. Form a band. Exhibit in your house/shed/car/wherever.'
www.rachelgoodyear.com
review: salonvert
Last year EMBASSY’s members' show displayed 90 pieces of art work, which this year has expanded to an impressive 110. SALONVERT, owes its name to a luminous green wall in the downstairs exhibition room; a not so subtle reference to the beautiful deep green walls of the 18th century Parisian Salon on which a myriad of works would hang.
In the spirit of the Salon’s eclecticism, there are a vast array of different themes, mediums and aesthetics in evidence here, though the dominance of drawing over painting is clear. The subtlety of Hugo de Verteuil’s pencil drawing, and Catriona Whiteford’s collage, cuts through the crudity of the exhibition. The exposed brick of the old church creates an interesting space, and the haphazard curation successfully mirrors the artworks in some cases.
However, smaller pieces litter the floor like an afterthought, and works such as Nathan Anthony’s ‘U-H’, in which an ejaculation of glass protrudes from a plastic UHU tube, would certainly benefit from the aesthetic of a white cube gallery. There is a droning sound that filters throughout the gallery space, and reaches a crescendo as one descends the stairs, a result of five video pieces placed incongruously on chairs. What sounds like the residue of a technological process filtered through some mild drum and bass emanates from one video piece, but one can’t be sure. The pieces in this exhibition bleed into one another, so that as with the sickly green wall downstairs, one is left disconcerted by the spectacle.
first published in the journal, sunday 13th february
www.journal-online.co.uk
review: rosemarie trockel: drawings, collages and book drafts
In the 1980s, when Monika Sprüth and Rosemarie Trockel were asked why their sporadically published magazine “Eau de Cologne” featured no male artists, they replied with a brazen “oops, no men, we hadn’t noticed.” Their playful simulation of the disregard endemic in the male-dominated academic system remains integral to Trockel’s work after 3 decades, and she continues to subvert established structures with a similar feminist voice to Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. Naturally, this inherent chauvinism was more prevalent during Trockel’s inauguration into orthodox art networks. However, due to its necessarily indeterminable nature, and despite its gradual dissipation, it remains at the fundamental roots of our cultural coding. Thus, the idea of complete elimination has been replaced by attempts to undermine the parasitic nature of this built-in sexual hierarchy.
Trockel’s ‘knitted paintings’ were her ticket to fame, their novelty value perfectly appealing to the zeitgeist of the late 1980s; marking a devaluation of inherently feminine art procedures, alongside an exemplary Baudrillardian notion of the arbitrary sign/signifier relationship. Despite the critical, and popular, success of Trockel’s ‘knitted paintings,’ her drawings remain integral to her work, and Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery, in conjunction with Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunstmuseum Bonn, presents more than 200 of her works on paper. The exhibited pieces are steeped in art history, with direct references to Warhol, George Grosz, Rubens and Käthe Kollwitz, alongside indirect, aesthetic allusions to Dumas, Hockney and David Shrigley. Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Invention (1993) creates a clear parallel with Grosz’s 1919 collage Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor, directing attention to the notion of ‘male artist’ as an invention, rather than inventor, of academia.
Untitled (2000) shows a skirt of warm, mottled hues resting on a single, perfectly poised, disembodied leg. Coloured pencilling, reminiscent of Hockney’s portraits of the 1970s, constructs the form of the asymmetrical subject, her childish boot imparting the vague impression of a young girl, meandering, playing a game against herself. Although painstakingly rendered, this repetitive mark making is not something instrumental in Trockel’s art practice. Her frequent employment of acrylic paint with the translucent appearance of watercolour demonstrates a resolution to obliterate the blatant formations that determine representation. Thus, Trockel’s manipulation of drawing is not only conceived as imprinted fleeting thought, but also, as in the work of Daniel Buren, as a paradigm of her uncertainty concerning the nature of re-presentation administered, and dictated by authoritative systems.
Vorstudies show oblivious male figures, with delicate explosions of white on their backs, portraying something between the stains of ejaculation and bird shit, to which these male victims are entirely oblivious. The ignorance of the figures is immediately intelligible, as are the stains themselves which, together, provide a voyeurism entirely indebted to Trockel’s own engagement with a predominantly male environment. Although Trockel’s work affords a feminine sensibility, as well as aligning itself with necessarily feminist concerns, her work is not reduced to feminist art. Her drawings and collages achieve a delicate, clumsily visceral texture, with a simultaneous crude brutality, that speaks more of a constant interaction with the inaccessible and contradictory nature of humanity, rather than constantly drawing our attention to the male/female divide. Trockel does not employ the categorical imagery or references found in characteristically feminist works, such as Judy Chicago’s infamous The Dinner Party, but instead manipulates us towards a gradual realisation of the limitations that result from a male-orientated academic culture.
Trockel creates a world where men resemble monkeys, and their noses resemble penises, where subjects are often obscured by black hats or masks, or severed at the neck. Her visual language permeates her entire oeuvre, despite its schizophrenic nature, and manifests most significantly in her paper works. Drawing allows Trockel “both springboard and experimental space [that] for all its heterogeneity evinces continuities of both form and space.” Even her drawing, then, continuously oscillates between subject and aesthetic, but sustains her idiosyncratic discourse. If drawing functions as pure experimentation, then her more recent use of collage allows her experimentations to be reformed and re-contextualised. Schlafmohn (Opium Poppy) (2001) features Trockel’s reoccurring motif of the black hat, obscuring the head of the subject, whilst his body rests somewhere between lounging and crouching. Trockel’s preoccupation with sexual delineations results in this appearance of animal-like states, juxtaposing the unconscious mind and the primitive nature of beasts.
Trockel’s “book-drafts” – never exhibited so extensively before – unveil the artist’s undeniable prolificacy; they function like relentless proposals, blue-prints, fleeting thoughts, philosophical musings, microscopic observations of human life. Her notebooks are a similar validation of her consistent engagement with social implications, and her dissension of male-dominated cultural production. Theatrical, chimerical, grotesque and threatening, Rosemarie Trockel’s subversion of artistic frameworks necessitates an unsettling array of works. Through eschewing her multi-faceted work in sculpture, painting and film, Talbot Rice has astutely presented the most engaging works in her oeuvre. Trockel’s attempts to disrupt curatorial roles, and museological dictations, are subtle enough to be almost imperceptible; the processes she utilises are so firmly integrated into the codes she wishes to subvert, that any political implications her work may have, cannot escape the inevitable danger of going unnoticed. Realisation does not necessarily come in the gallery space, but Trockel’s meticulousness ensures that it will come at some point, bringing the limitations of a chauvinist culture crashing down with it.
review: new work scotland programme, nicolas party & catherine payton
collective gallery, 10 december 2010 – 6 february 2011
The second instalment of Collective’s New Work Scotland Programme, features Glaswegian painter Nicolas Party and recent Edinburgh College of Art graduate Catherine Payton. Both artists produce site-specific pieces, which function in radically different ways. Party draws directly onto the gallery wall, surrounding it with disconcertingly bright blue and orange painted stripes. A decidedly formalist approach, the artist adopts different genres, referencing art history and parodying outdated art forms in order to interrogate the language of painting. This rather over-invested approach jars with the subtle and intuitive way in which Payton appears to have produced her elements of the show.
Catherine Payton’s installation has autobiographical roots but it expands far beyond them. Her starting point is a screenplay that she adapts from Martin Heald’s ‘Destiny: One Man’s Journey through Death, Life and Rebirth’ Payton’s script lies on a wooden table surrounded by props. A severed arm lies discarded on the floor, a video set of the artist clumsily tap dancing around the barren space loops, and from behind a locked door a flock of birds chirp endlessly. An incongruous mixture of sounds, images and objects, the scene remains inaccessible if one does not refer to her script.
This exhibition is neither immediate nor easy. Time must be invested in appreciating the eccentricity of Nicolas Party’s colour palette, and the obscurity of Catherine Payton’s story telling. Both artists entangle themselves in the bizarre possibilities that site-specific work can offer, they simply demand a similar effort from the viewer.
published in edinburgh journal, sat 22nd january
www.journal-online.co.uk
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